Reciprocal Teaching is a widely acclaimed and research-supported way to focus on four learning strategies that are essential to reading comprehension. Students are taught the strategies of summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. Then each student uses one of the strategies during a discussion of a reading assignment. Middle school students love the opportunity to participate in this loosely structured small group activity.

This PowerPoint presentation gives a reminder that RT is not a complete reading program in and of itself. It fleshes out some important details about the 4 RT strategies, with some clever graphics for “Madame the Powerful Predictor,” “Quincy the Quizzical Questioner,” “Clara the Careful Clarifier,” and “Sammy the Super Summarizer.” These would be fun to use as classroom posters!

What if RT were actually implemented on a large scale, such as with every student in a certain grade? This link describes such a project, with RT implemented in all 4th and 10th grade classrooms in the district for a year. When the test results were in, the percent of 4th graders meeting the state standard had increased from 14.4% to 28.8%, and the percent of 10th graders meeting the standard had increased from 13.3% to 23.2%.

This article begins with a discussion of RT as used in one teacher’s 3rd grade classroom, but most of the points are just as relevant to middle school. The last sections, “Benefits of Reciprocal Teaching” and “Challenges of Reciprocal Teaching,” are especially relevant. The benefits of RT can go beyond learning gains in reading comprehension.

Here’s a snappy video to introduce students to, or remind them about, the 4 RT roles. This would be a great video to play in the classroom every now and then, to remind students to use each of the RT strategies.

Don’t miss this! Scroll to the bottom to find links to amazing downloads. The first is one that you can cut out and fold to make a 4-sided pyramid. Another is a cue card reminder of the RT roles. The next is a one-page graphic organizer for groups to use to summarize their RT strategy work. Then there is a design for a cutout to fold into a cube, for students to “roll the dice” to practice the 4 RT strategies.

Once you turn the discussions over to student groups, they will still need something to keep learning going. One thing that keeps learning going is the RT format of assigning one of the 4 strategy roles to each of the 4 students in a group. I love listening to what these students have to say about how RT keeps their learning going when the teacher asks, “What do you think about this process of Reciprocal Teaching?”

As cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner once said, learning needs something to get it started, something to keep it going, and something to keep it focused. Here’s what it looks like to “get them started” using Reciprocal Teaching. Middle school students pick up on this really quickly.

This is a great overview of Reciprocal Teaching. I like that it provides an outline of one way to approach the initial teaching of the 4 RT strategies. Once students have been taught these 4 strategies, it will be time to turn the discussions over to them. Research has shown that structuring student discussion using the RT format results in greater learning gains than traditional teacher-led discussion.